Leo Danconia started out in marketing as an executive assistant, but he quickly worked his way up through the ranks to the COO seat. Despite a position that much older marketing professionals might envy, it wasn’t long before he left the agency and struck out on his own. That daring decision paid off when he built a successful performance marketing firm delivering insurance calls. At just 25, he’s now taking his call experience to the lead space with his latest venture, Inbounds.io.
Despite his early success, Danconia is quick to acknowledge the challenges. “There are always struggles and setbacks. I had to fall on my face a thousand times in order to find out how to make it work. Doing online lead generation is definitely a lot different than calls.” To get started, he and his business partner, David Brook, worked on building out a property to collect Health Insurance and Medicare leads.
They began by hiring developers off of sites like Upwork, but when the results failed to live up to the price tags, they took matters into their own hands and learned to code. Long hours and late nights yielded www.americanfirsthealth.com, designed to help connect customers with health insurance plans that fit their specific needs and priorities. The site quickly attracted the attention of providers in the space that are high up on the value chain, and Danconia and Brook started shopping for a system to effectively distribute their leads.
Shortly after adopting a competing distribution platform, the cofounders were introduced to Lead Prosper by a mutual friend. As Danconia recalls, “It was immediately obvious that Ross and Jason and Raul were a great team that cared a lot about their customers. It felt like a perfect match.”
Taking the Leap
Inbounds.io quickly migrated to the new platform, and it didn’t take long for the decision to reap dividends. “Lead Prosper offered a simpler, more intuitive interface with the kind of service the giants in the space can’t offer. Raul and Ross, those guys are a godsend—they were so helpful when we were just trying to get our feet wet, and I don’t think we would’ve been able to do this without them.”
Imagining a path without Lead Prosper, Danconia supposes “We would either still be in our infancy, or we would have had to hire expert help which would have cost us an arm and a leg. When you’re starting out, cash is always a concern, so we didn’t want to have to spend thousands to set everything up. They were crucial to getting us going, and their support and flexibility has been amazing—we would suggest features and they’d get started on them almost immediately.”
One of Danconia’s favorite features of the Lead Prosper platform has been the Highest Bidder feature of ping post. “The highest bidder feature has enabled us to have dozens of buyers bidding on a lead in a fraction of a second, and Lead Prosper automatically collates those bids and sends the lead to the buyer offering the best price.” It’s a major win for a company like Inbounds.io, whose leads have demonstrated a clear demand for a specific service and thus command a premium with lead buyers.
Fueling the Future
Inbounds.io started out in the Health Insurance space, but it has its sights set on growth, with plans to expand to properties in additional insurance verticals like Life and Auto. Moving forward, Danconia and Brook see Lead Prosper as an integral partner that’s vital to help their company reach its full potential. As Danconia explains, “I see Lead Prosper being part and parcel of wherever we take our business.”
It’s perhaps the highest praise our customers can offer, and we look forward to supporting Inbounds.io through all its future stages of growth.